Milan Fashion Week: Post-human gimmickry

Outside the controlled conditions of catwalk shows at Milan Fashion Week, political adversaries and riot police clashed in the lead up to one of the most fiercely contested Italian elections in recent history, with far-right candidates growing in popularity and anti-fascist protesters attempting to stem the tide. "You'd think Italian fashion would be right in there. It's one of the points of the job, after all: to hold a mirror up to the moment and reflect it in a material way," muses Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times. Instead, she continued, Milan closed in "full back-pedal mode".

Gucci

Instead of engaging with the urgency of the politics at hand, Gucci's commercial dynamo Alessandro Michele, responsible for the most anticipated collection of the week, chose to immerse himself in that classic pseud territory: fashion-does-philosophy. This time it was Donna Haraway's 1984 feminist posthumanist text, A Cyborg Manifesto, which theorises blurred boundaries between human, machine and animal. On the catwalk this meant that amid Michele's rampant eclecticism and many-layered looks of ultimately wearable (if astronomically expensive) clothes, models carried mini 3D models of their own heads and baby dragons. If only the play with diversity articulated through numerous headdresses – of which Sikh turbans, hijabs and bindis on white models attracted strong criticism – were as present in Gucci's casting. As Jo Ellison points out in the Financial Times, "According to the Instagram site @moremodelsofcolour, which keeps a tally, only 13 per cent of the 90 looks shown on the Gucci AW18 catwalk were seen on models of colour".

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Over at Moschino, there was also an extraterrestrial theme, but they were less cyberpunk, more space-age – models in skirt suit outfits, styled after Jackie O, had skin painted Martian green, blue, orange and pink. Designer Jeremy Scott's commitment to inclusivity was coherently spelled out, as Nicole Phelps of vogue.com reports, "The subtext was what made this show compelling. Scott is outspoken in his politics, and he's strongly opposed to Donald Trump's stance on illegal aliens. 'I'm not anti-alien,' he said. "I don't want to build a wall."

Elsewhere, Prada presented a challenging, complex image of gender in the new lacquered black extension of the Prada Foundation art gallery – prefaced by the appearance of a drone filming the audience. Mrs Prada mixed girlish cliches of bows, flowers, sheer fabrics, neckties and ankle socks with breakneck neons in pleather and plastic, protective workwear and Star Trek-style name badges (whose all-new series is led by strong female characters). For Friedman, "It was hard to digest (harder, in any case, than Mrs Prada's favorite canape: anchovy and lemon on buttered bread) and harder to look away. Shrug, if you dare."

Prada

Versace's tartan mini-skirted 'clans' drew a lot of comparison to the 1995 film Clueless on social media – with the addition of headscarves and berets (head gear has been big news across the shows for AW 2018). For Scarlett Conlon in The Guardian, as well as having delved into Gianni's archive to produce a confident retro-look collection, Donatella focused on products loved by millennial fans. "Versace ticked this box today with trainers (to please 'the sneaker geeks'), football scarves, logoed sweaters and T-shirts (like last season) and all-over plaid skirt suits that tapped into the insatiable demand for 1990s nostalgia."

The very post-human returned again at Dolce and Gabbana's show, where, after a long delay that saw Anna Wintour threaten to leave, the catwalk was taken over by a parade of flying drones carrying handbags. After that, it was business as usual with a show of past Dolce and Gabbana signatures, according to Tyler McCall at Fashionista. "Lacy details, bedazzled Mary Janes, flirty minidresses, ruched corset-and-pencil-skirt numbers, brocade suiting and outerwear, and enough sequins to keep a kindergarten arts-and-crafts class in supply for several decades." But nodding to the future consumers, like Versace, Dolce too peppered the collection with sneakers, Yeezy-esque bike shorts and bombers.

Established design houses in Milan walked a tightrope between past glories and diverse, digitally oriented futures. However, if they shut their ears to the political realities, they risk losing touch with the present.